Highway 22

Highway22

KNOWING YOUR AUDIENCE


This particular project was working with a Marketing agency in Kansas City. What was interesting about this was while they had billed themselves as knowing UX, they didn't really as you will soon see...

What Problems was there to solve for the user?

The actual client was a Federal Health Insurance agency who was wanting to get into Federal Life Insurance. The agency had put together a competitive analysis and a prototype before we got there. It consisted of what one might expect from a Marketing agency. Competitive analysis on the colors, fonts and general look and feel from what they deemed competitors. They ran some numbers on demographics and found that on average the age was around 30-years-old of a person looking to buy life insurance. The prototype was also geared to that demographic. Kitschy, fun, simple.

The only real problem with that was that wasn't the age of Federal workers and they had basically got the entire thing wrong.

How it was solved

personanumbers

First I dug into who Federal Workers really were. Average Age turned out to be between 45-65 years old to start with. That alone was a big change from 30. So the cutsie tongue-in-cheek playfulness of their prototype would have turned off the age group, let alone the fact that they were also well educated. That also affects the tone one should take on a website that isn't about reading, but taking action.

Once we figured out the demographics and personas and the tone, we needed to determine what the actual competitors looked like. The Marketing agency had done the same thing on general life insurance companies, not Federal Life insurance. Another HUGE difference. Huge.

Turns out that Federal workers get Life Insurance called FEGLI. However, once they've had it for a time, the rates skyrocket and it is more beneficial to find their own. Which is where this company comes in. It was also a key element when I created a current and future state Journey Map. The map is backed by data and is presented as a deliverable for my current state analysis.

In the beginning this really was the pivot point for UX. Once I presented this to the client, he pushed back where I had on the map that the Federal worker would talk to HR, and once I proved where that was at in my data, he absolutely had a new respect for UX. From that point forward, he would ask my opinion on everything rather than the agencies opinion. It shows the difference of opinions and data-driven solutions and the ROI they bring.

journey

We brought with us a set of developers and I worked hand-in-hand with them to create the IA, the design plan and created the slides for our sprint reviews.

`roadmap

Measuring success

I moved to Boston to work for IBM Watson Health before I saw a finish to the project. I would have done a combination of user interviews, usability testing and analytics to get my measurement of success. The life insurance company was willing to give me access to their users, so we would have easily been able to do enough testing to get the right results.

`usability

Description

  • Role: UX Design Director

  • August 2015 - February 2016

While I worked yet again with several people I had worked with at Block, I was able to run UX while at Highway 22. My old boss was now CEO and I was in charge of other designers and the actual work.

This wasn't my only project, but it was a great example of the power of data-driven design.